“I am going to bed,” I said. “Don’t call back.”
I left the phone off the hook, lowered the volume, and shoved it under a pillow. And then I went back to sleep.
Here’s a piece of advice. Always remember to turn off your cell phone when you’re charging it or you could get a call at 4:42 a.m. from an obsessive-compulsive detective having a mental meltdown.
I didn’t hear the call, since the charger is in the kitchen. But Julie heard it. She padded into my room and shook me awake.
“What is it?” I asked. “Are you sick?”
She held the cell phone out to me. “It’s Mr. Monk. He’s sick.”
I took the phone from her and shouted into it. “I told you not to call.”
“It’s a medical emergency,” Monk said hoarsely.
“So call 911,” I said.
“I did,” Monk said. “But they wouldn’t come.”
“What’s the emergency?”
“I can’t swallow,” he said.
“Why not?”
“I forgot,” Monk said, and began tearlessly weeping. “I’ve forgotten how to swallow. I’m going to die.”
“What did the 911 operator tell you to do?”
“She told me to swallow.”
“Good advice,” I said and removed the battery from my phone.
When I arrived at Monk’s house the next morning, I found him in his bed, fully dressed, holding a can of Lysol in each hand, aimed at the door.
“Have you been lying like that all night?” I asked.
“I’m under siege,” he said.
“There’s nobody around,” I said.
“Germs,” Monk said. “They are everywhere.”
“That’s not exactly a revelation,” I said. “You’ve known that all of your life.”
“But they weren’t coming to get me before,” Monk said.
“What makes you think they are coming now?”
“I can feel it,” Monk said and started spraying all around him until he was surrounded by a cloud of Lysol mist.
“Is it safe for you to be breathing that stuff?”
“It’s disinfectant,” Monk said. “It’s safer than air.”
I didn’t share that belief, so I stepped out of the room. I used the moment of privacy to ponder my next move. Monk was falling apart, his shrink was on his way to Europe, and I was completely alone. It could only get worse. What was I going to do?
On the bright side, Monk seemed to have remembered how to swallow.
The phone rang, so I answered it.
“Good morning, Natalie,” Captain Stottlemeyer said cheerfully. “How is Monk today?”
“A complete wreck,” I said.
“Even though Randy’s dogged investigation led to the recovery of his lost sock?”
“Dr. Kroger went on vacation,” I said.
“Oh hell,” Stottlemeyer said.
“Monk didn’t call you?”
“Thankfully, no.”
“He called me twice last night before I disconnected my phones,” I said. “Why didn’t he call you?”
“He knows I would have shot him to put him out of his misery,” Stottlemeyer said. “And mine.”
“It was a serious question,” I said.
“He used to call me all the time, day and night, to complain about dust bunnies and potholes and God knows what else. My wife was furious. She wanted me to get a restraining order against him. So I finally had to tell Monk that he was ruining my marriage and that if he called me at home again, I’d fire him. I guess it hasn’t sunk in yet that I’m divorced. Please don’t remind him.”
“You’ll have to give me something in return,” I said.
“How about a murder?” he said.
“You’re going to kill Monk for me?”
“I am standing beside a dead guy and I have no idea who killed him,” Stottlemeyer said. “I’m thinking that a murder case might be exactly what Monk needs right now.”
I never thought that I’d ever welcome the news that a person had been murdered, but I’m ashamed to say that, in this situation, I did.
CHAPTER SIX
Mr. Monk Loses Count
Ever since I started working for Monk, a lot of my morn-ings have begun with a corpse. I used to find that strange and unsettling. Now it’s typical. I don’t want to say I have become blasé about it, but it just goes to prove that over time you can get used to just about anything.
Nine out of the ten cases Monk takes on begin in the morning. The sun rises and somebody stumbles on a corpse left behind the night before. I really have no statistics to back this up, but it seems to me that most murders happen at night.
I can see why. If I was going to commit a crime, I’d do it in the dark so nobody could see me doing my nasty deed. There is also something about doing wrong in the bright light of day that makes it feel even more wrong. When you’re giving in to your dark side, you instinctively want to do it in the dark.
It just feels right—not that I’ve given in to my dark side all that often. But when I have, with the possible exception of indulging in something decadently fattening, it has been at night.
This may seem like pointless musing to you, but I do a lot of pointless musing while looking down at a dead body. It helps distract me from things like Clarke Trotter’s caved-in skull.
Captain Stottlemeyer, Lieutenant Disher, and Monk don’t have that luxury. They have to pay attention to all the details of the crime, no matter how gory or sad. And Monk picks up even more details than anybody else.
Well, usually he does.
